[SnacksOnAPlane]

People should be aware that this does not mean you shouldn't meditate. At least give it a shot. The risk/reward ratio is so heavily skewed toward reward (what are the risks, really?) that you'd be foolish not to try it.

[richk449]

So like Pascal's Wager for meditation?

[tigershark]

Exactly. And to paraphrase some other comment read in this thread: "It's 1000s years that people practice religion, so it must imply that it is good for them". Mindfulness or meditation is just the usual wave of religion or spiritualism or whatever you want to call it mimetized as something more exotic and powerful. The peculiar thing is that for the most part the self-professed atheist are the most fervent proponents of this. So maybe it is true that spirituality is an innate need of the human race...

[vanderZwan]

Eh.. no? Mindfulness is something for which the results of trying it are testable. Pascal's Wager is a gamble about what happens beyond the verifiable. They are fundamentally different.

[tigershark]

Tell this to someone that committed suicide because of mindfulness.. Oh wait.. they look exactly the same to me in this case.

[vanderZwan]

This is you right now: https://xkcd.com/1901/

EDIT: Ok, fine, I'll bite: exactly the same how exactly?

Anti-depressants can cause suicide too: some people are too depressed to even commit suicide, and the anti-depressants give them enough mental energy to commit to that.

That doesn't mean anti-depressants are pseudo-science or a bad idea, it just means their usage must be determined on a case-by-case basis